Sir – Professor Oswyn Murray (Letters, February 5) makes a good joke about his tutor, the late ‘larger-than-life’ Dacre Balsdon and the very large Gormley nude iron man, which is soon to be installed on the roof of Exeter College’s Thomas Wood Building.

It is, however, perhaps a little unfair to blame Balsdon alone for the poor design of the Thomas Wood, built in 1964 on what had been the (old) Parker’s Bookshop.

The architect, Peter Bosanquet, and his associate, Lionel Brett, fourth Viscount Esher, must be named as the culprits for the faceless design, even if it was Dacre Balsdon who pushed the project through from conception to birth.

Lionel Brett later acknowledged that the Thomas Wood Building, in common with others of the time from Brett and Pollen, was far from bold: “with the hindsight of the more rhetorical Seventies some of our stuff looked pusillanimous and dull”, so at the very least Gormely's iron man, contra Mark Bridger’s strictures (Letters, February 5), might bring some degree of lift and thrust to an otherwise dismal elevation.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington